Christmas 2016, chat-bots are all the rage, so of course we decided to build a Christmas themed chat-bot for the holiday period.

The main idea behind the Elfbot was that over the holiday period the AnalogFolk office would be closed. So if you needed to get in contact with us through our Facebook page then we had hired a pretty lazy, incompetent helper to tide you over until we were back in the new year. The Elfbot that took over the AnalogFolk Facebook page for December could help you with any Christmas related problem you had (mainly in the form of some snark and an animated GIF).

The bot was a simple Node.JS project and technically speaking wasn't too difficult to develop. The main issues with creating a project like this came from the sheer amount of copy we needed to cover (Turns out there's a lot you can ask about in terms of Christmas), so this was a great project to highlight the pitfalls of creating a chat-bot without a clear map of intents / requirements at the beginning.

Above you can see the site that was created to promote the chat-bot. This site was a nice little playground to test some SVG work and animations. I ended up using the BodyMovin.js library and After Effects plugin, and I think it's safe to say it turned out quite nicely!